place without the agency of wizard or witch.  There is nothing more odious than this crime; it is hostile to God and man, and it must be expiated by death in the most terrible tortures.  Metamorphosis is a common art amongst Mpongwe magicians:  this vulgar materialism, of which Ovid sang, must not be confounded with the poetical Hindu metempsychosis or transmigration of souls which explains empirically certain physiological mysteries.  Here the adept naturally becomes a gorilla or a leopard, as he would be a lion in South Africa, a hyena in Abyssinia and the Somali country, and a loup-garou in Brittany.[FN#15]

The poison ordeal is a necessary corollary to witchcraft.  The plant most used by the Oganga (medicine man) is a small red rooted shrub, not unlike a hazel bush, and called Ikazya or Ikaja.  Mr. Wilson (p. 225) writes “Nkazya:”  Battel (loc. cit. 334) terms the root “Imbando,” a corruption of Mbundu.  M. du Chaillu (chap. xv.) gives an illustration of the “Mboundou leaf” (half size):  Professor John Torrey believes the active principle to be a vegeto-alkali of the Strychnos group, but the symptoms do not seem to bear out the conjecture.  The Mpongwe told me that the poison was named either Mbundu or Olonda (nut) werere—­perhaps this was what is popularly called “a sell.”  Mbundu is the decoction of the scraped bark which corresponds with the “Sassy-water” of the northern maritime tribes.  The accused, after drinking the potion, is ordered to step over sticks of the same plant, which are placed a pace apart.  If the man be affected, he raises his foot like a horse with string-halt, and this convicts him of the foul crime.  Of course there is some antidote, as the medicine-man himself drinks large draughts of his own stuff:  in Old Calabar River for instance, Mithridates boils the poison-nut; but Europeans could not, and natives would not, tell me what the Gaboon “dodge” is.  According to vulgar Africans, all test-poisons are sentient and reasoning beings, who search the criminal’s stomach, that is his heart, and who find out the deep hidden sin; hence the people shout, “If they are wizards, let it kill them; if they are innocent, let it go forth!” Moreover, the detected murderer is considered a bungler who has fallen into the pit dug for his brother.  Doubtless many innocent lives have been lost by this superstition.  But there is reason in the order, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” without having recourse to the supernaturalisms and preternaturalisms, which have unobligingly disappeared when Science most wants them.  Sorcery and poison are as closely united as the “Black Nightingales,” and it evidently differs little whether I slay a man with my sword or I destroy him by the slow and certain torture of a mind diseased.